Gormongous

A former classmate from grad school (I call her Mean Christine) does SCA. She just commented on a photo from a Facebook friend named "Baronne Melisande Outremer." I have no words. No wait, actually I do. I'm not prone to nerd rage these days, but this totally got my goat. It's like having an American persona named "President Mickey Mouse New York." Argh.

This is pretty much the fight I mentioned in this thread a couple of pages ago, during which my friend got so frustrated she started crying. She thought that Another derived all its suspense from an incomplete knowledge of the rules for the curse, making the final revelation an inevitable letdown, while I thought it all made the curse something like a character, with its own arc and everything. I'm glad you liked it too, Tegan! I'm probably going to buy it once my funding check arrives at the end of August, if I can win the bet I seem to have made with myself to survive the month on a hundred bucks.

I've always thought that "Remember the Airfield" might be the best Idle Thumbs episode ever, so this is exciting. I need to find some time to listen, asap.

PSA: the 1.11 patch broke compatibility with older saves (a programmer added an entry at the beginning rather than the end of the traits list, meaning that everyone in the game has the traits one before what they should have, "Born in the Purple" becomes "Blinded," and so on). Paradox has acknowledged the mistake but will not be fixing it, so if you want to continue with your pre-1.11 saves (which I assume everyone does), you'll need to register an account on the Paradox forums so you can download this mod, install it to the "%Username%\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Crusader Kings II\mod" directory, and enable it in the launcher.

This is one of the weirder design decisions in the Civilization series because, at least in the second and third games, war is powerful to the point of complete imbalance. Its biggest disincentive is that it's a lot of clumsy busywork, but if you can stomach it, man. The highest score I ever got in Civ IV was a domination victory. I think it was 479,000 adjusted? My highest non-aggressive was 85,000 adjusted for an extremely lucky Medieval diplomatic victory. There's just not enough downsides to the early elimination of one or two neighbors, although Nick was talking a few episodes back like his bellicose behavior lost a game for him recently? It almost makes me curious enough to bite.

I've now played as Burgundy in Europa Universalis IV up through 1650. I managed to swing a personal union with Savoy, which gave me a nice corridor between the ports of Antwerp and Genoa. I'm making big bucks from that near-monopoly. I thought I did a great job cutting France off at the knees in the mid-sixteenth century, but then Spain came up and ate the rest. Now they rule the world. I could write a song about how much I hate Austria. The chorus would be a really raucous "Fuck you, Austria. Leave me the fuck alone!" If I don't want to tango with Spain, I've got to steal scraps from the Holy Roman table, which means that Austria can't resist kicking me in the balls. I hate Austria so much. I must have murdered at least a million of their men over the past two hundred years.

I ended up coming around pretty strong on my initial ambivalence over Another. I look forward to hearing how your opinion holds up through the ending. Rest assured, you've got plenty of twists and turns, some more successful than others.

Is it the full Europa Universalis III with all the expansions? If so, it's pretty good, but else it's not worth your time. Only with the second expansion, In Nomine, did EU3 start to get interesting. Europa Universalis IV is more of an evolutionary game, taking all the elements that EU3 acquired over the years and integrating them into a single whole, but it is a complete package, as opposed to EU3.

This is a separate and baffling thing. Is it just something that Japanese companies are prone to do? Bandai Entertainment did the same with the Jin-Roh and Ghost in the Shell: Innocence movies. It's like they think scarcity-driven pricing of used copies is unrelated to the possible success of a second run.

It's threefold, I think. First, I'm not aware of the details regarding the deal between Nintendo and Gamestop, but a publisher usually gets a cut from new sales, not from used. Second, new games are expected to sell at no more than their MRSP, but used games can sell for any price. Third, Gamestop has stated that Xenoblade Chronicles was a limited run, but the existence of new copies makes it look like that was just artificial scarcity for a very popular game. I'm sure there's even more going on than that, though. Anyone else have thoughts for what Gamestop's motives would be, if the copies of Xenoblade are new?

The main evidence for the "printed new, sold used" argument is these photos: The original run had the Wii logo cut inside the case, but the logo was changed to a Nintendo logo when the WiiU came out. All the new "used" copies of Xenoblade Chronicles have the Nintendo logo, implying that either Gamestop swapped all the used copies they'd been hording into new but otherwise identical cases, or that the copies themselves are new.

Yeah, that's kind of why I think that Crusader Kings II is the best game to recommend to Paradox newbies, however much people like to tout the Europa Universalis series as the most accessible. You just have one guy to look after, one guy, and the rest is really gravy. Yeah, gravy that fucks you fifty years in, but still. Europa Universalis IV, with its trade flow and monarch points, is just so much less intuitive. Fifteen hours into the demo, I'm still not exactly sure how to get the most out of a trade node, let alone be something crazy like Holy Roman Emperor.

My experience playing this has been betting chump change because I blew my load way too quick, then laughing uproariously as the chat freaks out. The other people really are what makes the game. My neighbors must think I'm crazy, but Vulture-Man vs. Dark Chun-Li had me on the floor in tears, literally.

It still bums me out from time to time when someone on the internet calls me an asshole for expressing my honest opinion. I knew that guy from school. Our parents went to the same church. He crashed in my friends' hotel room during an anime convention. He's always been a huge jerk to me. I'm sure his new web series is good or whatever, but I'm going to pass. At what point over those five sentences did I cross some invisible line?

Dude, I'm not disputing that. I'm just saying, if you're writing a character built around human inconsistencies, build it into the dialogue around him, too. Otherwise everyone seems crazy. Why was Lee never like, "What? I've done plenty for you," the ten thousand times that Kenny told him he'd never had his back?

The easy reason is that it's an older series, based on a board game, from before the first Crusader Kings was even developed, but I think it's more that each of the PDS games is about the motive force of a given age. For Crusader Kings it's family, for Europa Universalis it's the nation, for Victoria it's industry, and for Hearts of Iron it's war. As much as I like them, I don't think that Crusader Kings' character-based systems would make much sense in Europa Universalis, where the basic building-blocks of the game are nations, made up of provinces according to culture.

Well... except that Gamestop is selling the copies as used, which means they aren't giving Nintendo jack.

No worries! Differences of opinion happen between reasonable people. It just kills me because I pirated games constantly in high school and college, before pricing got to be a bit more democratic thanks to Steam (and I grew up a bit, too). So, any time someone begins to make the market or scarcity arguments for games, I start to think, "Yeah, or I could get them for free with a lot less effort," and then I get sad again.

I don't agree. Just because you can charge a given price for something doesn't mean you should. I don't think there's any economic argument you can make to change my mind on this. They could charge $10,000 per game and people would still buy them, but that doesn't keep it from being a negative thing for companies, customers, and the industry as a whole.

God, the comments on that article... Why is it that in recent years, the whole argument of "video games are luxury goods, therefore any amount of unethical behavior regarding them is totally cool and warranted" has become ubiquitous among fanboys and industry apologists? EDIT: Daesin, if they're creating artificial scarcity because they're the sole distributor of a given title, then flooding the market to profit from those prices, that is unethical. It's unethical with diamonds, it's unethical with video games. When a company controls the whole market for a given product, there is no "market can bear" bullshit. And that is what's going on, from the evidence I've seen. There are multiple pictures in the comments thread showing that these are brand new copies not printed by Nintendo, using generic packaging materials but with all pack-ins present.

Maybe? FUNi's never been strong on extras. They're always about "HD on the minimum possible number of discs." The two Blu-rays that Spice & Wolf is crammed onto make me shudder sometimes. But hey, that's the past.

I think it might be more like, Nick talks in direct proportion to how much time Chris and Jake spend baiting him, which they have less chance or less inclination to do with more people on deck. Either way, the outcome is the same.

Leaving aside the discussion we're somehow still having about which part of the Thumbs' awesomeness is most integral, I'd like to agree vocally with how Chris described Nick's understanding of medieval history. It seriously is the funniest, weirdest, most frustrating thing I've come across in a while. As far as I can tell from the streams, Nick understands the Middle Ages as a time without any higher authority to constrain those who ruled, but feudal politics was really more like how much of your neighbors' stuff you can borrow and how much of their goodwill you can abuse without them moving away or kicking your ass. The king who behaved the most like Nick wants was King John of England. He married a woman betrothed to his vassal, punished other vassals for minor slights, and told the pope to go fuck himself. As a result, he lost all his continental holdings, got England placed under papal interdict, fought off a French invasion, and was forced to sign the Magna Carta, all before dying of dysentery and leaving his son the first child-king since before the Norman conquest. There are mods for Crusader Kings II like The Prince and the Thane that do better to simulate the fundamentally affective character of medieval rule, compared to which the vanilla game is quite lenient. Still, if Chris rather than Nick were playing, it'd probably a lot less entertaining, if also less infuriating. If anyone's curious about the experience of medieval lordship, I.S. Robinson's Henry IV of Germany, 1056-1106 from 2000 is a great study on one of the Middle Ages' most controversial kings. I'd recommend something on King John, like W.L. Warren's 1978 book, but I honestly find Anglophone scholarship on the Plantagenets a little stodgy and would feel bad if it were read on my account. EDIT: Or I could be incredibly cruel and recommend Bissons' The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government. Fascinating, but impossibly self-indulgent. I guess you earn that right when you're emeritus at Harvard.

FUNimation announced at Otakon yesterday that they've picked up Cowboy Bebop from Bandai for a 2014 Blu-ray release. I'm assuming it'll be an upscale, but maybe it'll be a good upscale. Exciting.

I had a similar feeling when Sean talked about the attraction of LoMa games versus straight strategy games. Hasn't he heard of the Chick Parabola, invented on this very podcast? The majority of the fun I get out of strategy games is accomplishing a discrete goal, that's true, but usually the discrete goal is, "How can I better exploit the economic or military systems in this game?" Once I've got a strategy game all figured out, it's rare that I boot it up just to kick its ass a certain way.